New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Please note: This is a new edition of a previously announced text.
This book analyzes how news discourse was shaped over time by external factors, such as the historical context, news production, technological innovation and current affairs, and as such both conformed to and deviated from generic conventions. Using data from a newspaper corpus, it offers the first empirical study into the development of style in early mass media. In this analysis, media style appears as a dynamic concept which is highly sensitive to innovative approaches towards making news not only informative but also entertaining to read. This cutting-edge survey will be of interest to academics researching corpus linguistics, media discourse and stylistics.
"This is an outstanding book: theoretically and methodologically innovative yet well-anchored in the literature; wide-ranging yet systematic and detailed. It makes a real contribution to diverse fields. It sheds light on how corpus-based approaches can be deployed in the study of style, how styles interact with their social and pragmatic contexts and how change in style comes about ... All this is written up in polished prose." Dr Jonathan Culpeper, University of Lancaster, UK
Contents: Acknowledgements \\ List of Abbreviations \\ Introduction \\ Part I: Socio-Stylistic Dimensions \\ 1. Historical Corpus Stylistics and Early News Media \\ 2. Media Performance and Organization Profiles \\ 3. Media Variation and Stylistic Change \\ 4. Performance and Style: A Socio-Stylistic Profile \\ Part II: Technologically Facilitated Innovation \\ 5. Visual Foregrounding in Early Eighteenth-Century Headlines \\ 6. Syntactic Foregrounding in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century News Discourse \\ Part III: Situational Aspects: News Context and Early Media Change \\ 7.Macrotextual Foregrounding Strategies in Eighteenth-Century News Discourse \\ 8. Microtextual Foregrounding Strategies: Comment and News Context \\ Conclusion \\ References \\ Appendices I-III \\ Index